My own poetry, poetry is what I most love to read and write. It is the first category I select on anyone else’s site, but also realize it is not pleasing to everyone’s literary palette, and some of these are better than others. I sort of doubt Walcott or Ms. Oliver are the least bit nervous, however, enjoy these glimpses into my soul and how I see the world.
Sometimes I look and see that child in your eyes
Who believed his mother wise
and the source of all that love could deliver
Sometimes the teen who believed me only a fool
And my love was the greatest of lies.
Today I looked and saw a man
struggling just like me to find the pattern, master plan
that would make a treasured art mosaic
of all the broken pieces.
A new design another understands.
CC
You asked nothing of me
Except the friendship I so willing brought
Knowing you a brother from my past
You would give me safety in this life
and I would re-aquaint you with the meanings from your last.
And when I didn’t die as expected you said it still could be my home
This room duplicated, decorated from my many decades dreamtime
sanctum.
The first nine months I waited for the punchline
For the other shoe to drop, so close to bolting so many times
Riding through your dark periods of miasma angers and broken glass
“Please don’t leave,” you begged
So I didn’t. And therein my fatal flaw, I wanted what I couldn’t have
a home
and attached.
Your friendship followed through my days
like the crow triskell plastic decal on the sidedoor window
The heat of love not measured in ties of bank account or sexual attraction
began to
melt the cold glass walls I favor
and I forgot
the lesson of high tides full swell and gentle
and I let hope deposit kinship shells on my previous desolate beach.
Don’t get me wrong, my beach is not unique, all beaches lie desolate again each stormy tide.
Between I love my children so much that knowing my craziness and their embarrassment I keep the distance they set and store up all my mother memories in the rocky shoal caves beyond the reach of destroying tides.
And I have friends
Unimaginable wonderful magic friends
Best friends
I love and I am loved
Beyond measure and dreams.
But before this misstep, I had always remembered
I was the misfit toy
and
Everything ends
and
Everyone leaves.
In life
We don’t get what we deserve, we just get what we get
and I chose to make sand castles
and jump over the moon
but you said
land here
its safe
its home
its yours as long as you need it.
Believe in a postcard life.
I bought the straw dream
and began building, while wolfish you watched.
I have slept in the room with Damsels and Knights and a four poster bed
Kept my books in tall white shelves purchased with kindness
for eleven months
Like Frost’s Hired Man come home
Only Arizona has stayed cloudless on the orbish moons
and so against medical advice
I have also lived
I want to cry
get high
die
have someone hold me till all the echoes of all the partings and betrayals silence in my brain.
I do none of these.
I walk along the beach in the pelting, whips of rain
And Maybe tomorrow I’ll again wear my perfect pink galoshes.
CC
Bobcat Territory
The people here try to raise chickens for eggs
a money saving venture in which
they often recoup the initial cost of chicks
but not the cost of feed
or cost of warming lights
or chicken wire
or sleepless nights listening to the closer
closer closer prowl and howl of drifting coyote
or the guttural and eirie growl of the indigent feline families.
The bobcats prowl the farms watching for the night the headlights don’t return at dusk,
No more than three days past its new, the moon is best; pale and friendly to the hunt.
Like gossip in a workplace they work themselves between the wires
The carnage complete before it has begun.
Too late the headlights break across the stacked hay and metal fences.
The family of egg eaters tumble laughing into the house.
Mother looks one dirt road over where last year a man planted two palm trees that tower garishly above the grandfather cactus she loves, and ticks her tongue in annoyance
Disliking.
Unaware this imported arboreal talent provides an island ambience
to the grateful Bobcat picnic of plump hen and rangy rooster.
Their futile feathered frenzy finished before the bright light shone
The other hens discuss the coop combat in quieter, and quieter tones
Until plumped and justified in their stories of quiet clucks and bucks they roost
Contented they weren’t the chosen ones.
Innocent of all but nature the local kitties lick and clean their paws.
CC
Cold desert night ends
Morning and meaning its muse
Hummingbird dances
girl and chair collide
concentric coffee eddies
challenge glass boundary
seeing everything
automobile windows stare
and follow their flight.
Passive Resistance
We strummed acoustic guitars and sang in groups
Of missing flowers, blowing winds
As they approached with billy clubs and shields
Hurling insults and orders.
We met each others eyes and held ourselves in check with our chain of stares
The biting smoke they unleashed made even my airy soprano
a bit more Janis Joplin.
Our eyes streamed tears and nose dangled mucous tributes to
American justice
And voices quavery with chemical fear
Rose again in growing tides and waves
Unison, “Give Peace a Chance.”
Until the boys in blue
roused the angry soldier in one of us
and he became at last what he had yet refused to be
And he rose up into contact with the billy club and shouted something back
and
that’s when the screaming started
and the bruises and the blood and the blame poured out
in American portions, service for one
but plenty for all to share.
I sat unmoving still keeping our three sets of eyes locked
Quietly caging our animal need to run, respond, fight back.
I had three stitches in my chin and two butterflies and my first bald patch on my head
You an armcast, and she with nothing broken
was witch green with healing bruises and a Jimmy Durante nose.
We were the lucky ones.
Who knew peace could hurt so much.
Five days later we buried the one who fought, the one who fled
Ourselves quite alive, only our belief in justice was dead.
CC
“Half my friends are dead.
I will make you new ones, said earth.
No, give them back, as they were, instead,
with faults and all, I cried”
excerpted from “Sea Canes” by Derek Walcott
Stone Silence